On 26 Dec 2004, at 00:37, Curtis L. Olson wrote:
What did I say that was incorrect? If I've missunderstood something about plib/ssg I'd appreciate being corrected. If modeling is still done in blender/ac/multigen/whatever, then you need a conversion path to plib. That means going through one of the existing loaders no matter how you approach it. Using .ssg doesn't gain you anything in terms of rendering quality or features since you have to pass through a higher level format anyway. The only thing .ssg gives you is potential model load performance increases, although I've never seen any comparison benchmarks ... If you do get a performance increase, then perhaps we could have some util that converts to other formats to .ssg on the fly ... so you pay a price when you first load a new model, but after that, for each subsequent run of the application, you can load the .ssg format.
We just need to handle this in a way the doesn't send us down a one way .ssg street.
What it means is that the MAX / Blender exporters for .ssg need to be linked against PLIB, but so what? That's not difficult (that I can see). And the core issue is that it's easier to do the selective mapping of modeller features (nurbs, meshes, materials, animations, whatever) to renderer features inside that modeller's exporter API, which invariably makes all the data available in sensible, documented ways. The exporter becomes code that builds a PLIB scene graph by traversing the modeller's data, and then saves that graph.
One catch is that the Blender exporter would have to be a compiled plugin, not a Python script (unless Norman is sitting on a Python-wrapper for PLIB :-), but that will still be less coding, and more maintainable, than trying to deal with the entirety of a Blender file (or other high-level format) inside a PLIB loader. Which, as you pointed out, is *exactly* why many of the PLIB loaders have limitations.
Again, this is exactly analogous to the 2d art pipeline - people edit in a rich format like Gimp / Photoshop, but no one would suggest trying to load those formats directly in a game (layers, paths and all); you keep your original files around some place, and export / Save As to whatever simple format suits your needs, whether it be PNG or RGB or JPEG.
Anyway, I'll go back to lurking now. James
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